Trust in the school context, especially around the use of technology.

Do we trust banks anymore?

61% of people trust someone like themselves. 38% trust government officials. These are statistics from a global survey by Edelman.

Paul Kemp Robertson mentions these stats in his TED Talk about Bitcoin and uses them to help explain why people are increasingly willing to trust corporations and individuals before they trust banks and governments.

Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency – a digital currency with no central regulating authority and as Robertson says,

It’s sort of gaining ground, it’s gaining respectability. You get services, like Reddit and WordPress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now. And that’s showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology, and it’s started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money.

It’s similar in a way to how technology is slowly starting to disrupt education. MOOCs and mobile learning in general are starting to put the agency into the learner’s hands rather than the institution’s. Some people don’t like that.

Anyone with a computer or smartphone has the power to access huge amounts of information. We don’t have to rely on a lecturer, teacher or library to provide it for us.

Sure this is informal learning but the rise of digital badging systems and accreditation for completing MOOCs is beginning to make it possible to have some sort of recognition of learning which occurs outside educational institutions.

Teachers often say that we want to create lifelong learners. It’s easier than it ever has been to be a lifelong learner.